Most of those dependencies are also unnecessary. Shadowrun combat has far more moving parts than it needs to.

Sometimes those are what the players are looking for, and more power to them, but they're not necessary for what the game's trying to do. I've just as often run it as cinematic combat where the target numbers are entirely eyeballed to keep the game moving at a fast clip and it works as well, if not better, than meticulous calculation.

Agreed.

They should be there as a guideline though, imho, so the GM knows how to estimate them.

That said, the current Edition has 50 pages on Combat. That is completely ridiculous.
Make it 10 and we can talk.

I note that 50 pages is five times as long as the entire base rules for Warhammer 40k in the current edition.

There's rules (Grimdark) made by fan that thought Games Workshop was screwing things up (and they are in some ways). All the base rules fit on ONE page. The special rules for units fits on another page or two... If someone can refine the rules for 40K to 2 or 3 pages, then Shadowrun can be refined down to 5 or 6 pages.

So much this !

That's not what quantum computing does. It doesn't let you submit login requests any faster than the host would accept anyway.

What it actually does would help to decode certain kinds of encrypted data more quickly, so if you have an encrypted password list on hand, it might help with that - but just slamming a password-mediated login interface with "password" then "Password" then "p@ssw0rd" and so on won't happen any faster because of Magic Quantum Sauce.

1) Make Cyberware cool again. SR5 brought us "Cyber = Aids" and a literal shitbag as new cyberware, so that is perhaps not the best way to make cyberware cool and desirable. Less half a page of rules to jup 2 meters with your cbyerlegs, but a simply Cyberpunk 2020 statement: "You have 2 cyberlegs? Awesome, you can now jump 10m high and 15m forward. Add 5min with a running start". That is how you make cyberware cool and desirable, not with "congratulations, you sacrificed two years of income, half of your essence, the entire capacity of your cyberlegs and now you got 6 bonus dices, and if you are really lucky you can now jump 2m longer".

2) No authors, devs and freelancers with a love for Auschwitz Dungeon Crawl runs to steal necromantic scalpels from those dirty jewish zombie ghosts, which you just took down with your sponsored Orichalkum chainsaw. All in all a different company with different authors, devs and freelancers.

3) No Wifi-silencers, thank you very much. More Wifi in the sense of Ecplipse Phase or http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...095&hl=mage

4) Less class-restrictions, more options to mix and match archetypes. One of the greatest points of SR was that you did not had a class system. You can and you should be able to match specialists with generalists, with a rule system supporting these choices.

SYL

That's the reason I said purported. I'm not anywhere near enough of a computer expert to know how it would work.

You didn't claim otherwise, but Echo Mirage predates the Matrix movie and the Matrix movie was in fact inspired by a short story in Virtual Realities for first edition. So, the Matrix was derived from Shadowrun, not the other way around. The Wachowskis ran into creative differences with FASA and wound up changing enough for FASA to allow them to proceed. I would have liked to have seen their original version.

I was skimming the thread because I was planning on restarting some houseruling for 5e.

In a new edition, I would like to see techomancers and Deckers to be streamlined. In both cases, they should have time consuming activities to find vulnerabilities and set up exploits. In combat, they take advantage of a prepared exploit. Otherwise, they should be restricted to TactNet management and ECM/ECCM activities and normal combat activities.

Techomancers should be treated less like non magic techomages and more like deckers empowered by AIs. I see the resonance as a Jungian AI subconscious permeating the matrix and techomancers as modified to have internal abilities and abilities to affect the matrix when connected to a server. Without a device being connected to a network that includes a server, the techomancer can't affect it with resonance abilities.

Wireless needs to be removed as a vulnerability. Encryption makes wireless secure and wireless bonuses are decent in theory, but they need to be revisted for sensibility. A stun baton recharges in the presence of wireless while the survival knife gives the bonus with access to GPS signals or matrix connections. Bricking via exploit is fine is fine if rare, but should be fixable.

Mystic adepts need to go back to independent progression for magician versus adept and should be moved out of the core book. Perhaps a unified maximum magic, but an increased initiation cost, and perhaps +1 per point of magic cost for the higher of the two and normal cost -x per point for the lower of the two. As compensation, raising adept magic grants a power point (so that the two aspects of the Mystic Adept follow the same rules as normal magicians and adepts (at least during the game session; keep rules deviations to downtime).

Technomancers as a Shadowrun concept need to die a death.

One of the most basic setting precepts is that magic and tech do not mix, and are in fact fundamentally incompatible. Technomancy essentially creates a fourth magical tradition, because it is impossible to explain within the setting outside of 'fuck it, AI are magic'.

The Decking toolset is essentially good for three things:

1. Downtime/prep work for runs. Deckers can do the necessary groundwork without having the drawbacks of doing it physically, such as being spotted casing a place, or drawing attention asking around about someone.
2. Being an alternative to using electronic sabotage / B&E skills on a run.
3. Dealing with specific edge cases the GM adds, such as data on a secure system only accessible physically.

If a Decker gets into combat, she needs to pull a fucking gun, dive for cover, or both at the same time. This is one of the reasons that, IMHO, decking needs to be reduced in both skill point and nuyen investment so that it isn't such a huge sink for a skill that isn't universally applicable the way the magical active skills are.

I disagree. The problem with technomancers is that they are handled as magic-but-not-magic. I don't think this was an issue with otaku (from 2e/3e), but an otaku did not have an innate matrix connection and could not force someone online.

If you constrain technomancers to abilities that are internal to themselves and abilities related to online connections ("internal" to the matrix), the technomancers are magic problems go away or are at least resolvable.

AIs are, in my opinion, less of an issue. However, they may require a different explanation of the matrix and SR computing. Instead of thinking that computers are logic boxes that execute code and do nothing that they are not told to do, consider that with the level of abstraction higher level of programming languages provide and patches across multiple layers of the software (BIOS, OS, application, at minimum), there is a degree of chaos. It is conceivable that in the SR world, with further abstractions and increased computing power (and perhaps a switch to quantum computing), the is a sufficient level of chaos that there can be separate computational ecosystem under the higher level code where the Deep Resonance and AIs dwell or draw their unique abilities.

Somehow Technomancers have devalued AIs.
Before, an AI was a Dragon. There were few, but they were alien and mighty.

Now AI and their analogues are many small things, from the matrix spirits that mancers use, to the AI that sprung from a dating sim or something in one of the adventure seeds in the Emergence book.

Ironically, giving the Matrix a more magical vibe has made it more mundane.

It wasn't an issue with otaku, because otaku were Deckers who paid karma for their decks instead of nuyen. Full stop.

There is no such thing as 'chaos' in computer systems, just bad interactions between written code. A 'separate computational ecosystem' still needs to be running on hardware, full stop, and something with sufficient power to simulate consciousness much less an ecosystem that can support several of them is going to eat a lot of computational power. That means a lot of real-world electrical power, and a lot of very visible 'hey, what's eating these system resources' questions from the people paying seven digit monthly datacenter power bills to run that hardware.

Your whole premise essentially relies on every system in the Matrix being functionally part of a cloud computing instance, and if something like a rogue AI can leech storage and processor cycles from everything on the Matrix at will, no network security is even remotely possible, because the system itself is designed to have root level hardware access to every device on it.

It was the word 'needs' that got my attention. In the real world, you are very likely correct. The topic of this conversation is not the real world, but what we'd enjoy seeing in the shared fantasy that we spend our valuable free time exploring, and while I completely agree with you it can be annoying when someone makes erroneous claims about how a segment of reality works, that discussion is, IMHO, the root cause of the rot at the core of the Shadowrun ruleset, and has been from the very beginning.

It may be possible to come up with a set of rules that can encompass a world with magic and a matrix, while also being true to common sense and real-world laws of physics, but I have severe doubts as to whether that game would be much fun to play.

So my advice to the publishers of the next edition would be: Stop trying to emulate reality. If that was what we wanted, we'd all be playing Flight Simulator XVII on quantum computers (see what I did there?). Go for simplicity, always follow the rule of cool - and bring back the punk, pretty please!

And keep the whole thing down to less than 100 pages. Unless you bring back the user comments from 1st-3rd edition, of course

I seem to recall that their submersion abilities, threading and daemon summoning exceeded 'decking without decks'....


...which results in chaos within computer systems. I'm glad we can agree.


Think of the Deep Resonance as a transcended VM management protocol that has been patched and patched to the point that no one really knows how it works internally, but they understand the API. They approach issues with redundant checks and garbage collection. They solve perceived inefficiencies with the attitude of "this is 20X0, storage and processing power is cheap and it would be too costly to debug and optimize that."

Now, the VM itself behaves fine, the data center has tons of resources, and it may be obfuscated that it has sanctioned 1,000 VM instances, but it is using resources for 1,050. The underlying VM management reports proper behavior through the API and for the most part, it is working fine.


Yes, I am modelling every server as a cloud instance and I am accepting the inability to to cut a server off from the deep resonance and otaku/technomancers who are directly connected to the server as an acceptable logic flaw in the abstraction.

In exchange for that flaw, AIs and technomancers are reasonably explained and do not lose their ability to function when connected to an isolated system.

However, the fact that technomancers and AIs can leach resources from the underlying hardware does not guarantee that they can access or manipulate any of the data. They still must connect with a VM instance (matrix node) to interact with it.

Chaos as parsed by a device reading machine code. Hell of a difference between 'huh, that lets me write to protected sectors on the disk and crash the whole system, probably should have had a sanity check in there' and 'whoops, AIM and Notepad had filthy sex in the back room and made the IRC protocol'.

Your entire concept of the Matrix relies on the Corps who have rebuilt it three times being willing to give away vast amounts of processing power and any concept of security, both of which are massively expensive. Not to mention reducing the science of software engineering to livestock breeding. It is about as good as a mini-sub escape from Bogota, and just as unnecessary for the setting.

Amen!

And it's precisely because of this that (though life interfered to distract me) I'm dusting off my SRV concept and getting back to it.

I completely agree with your three points, and the one after that about combat, but I stop short that technomancers need to die as a concept.

I think technomancers are very problematic in their portrayal and justifications, but the root idea is a cool one. Disclaimer: I run a heavily modified 2E game, so I'm not entirely up to snuff on 4E+ rules and fluff.

I think the writers should simply man up and say "it's a new form of magic." plain and simple. Harlequin is on record saying that eventually magic and tech will merge, and I think technomancy is a cool first look at that mix. They don't mix NOW, but the possibilities are endless. Hell, just go read the 2E adventure Imago (which I love). Shadowrun uses panpsychism (the idea that everything has a soul / that belief can shape reality) as its magical base, and a modern society will have a lot of belief (hence mana) flowing around the general idea of technology. Just like the newer gods in Gaiman's American Gods.

Is it unthinkable that perhaps a new kind of adept would surface? I'm actually using that as one of the big threads in the campaign I'm running right now. There's a lot of unknowns swirling around her, she assenses as mundane, and has no visible powers, but get her in the Matrix and weird stuff happens.

It's an idea that was great in its initial concept, so-so in its execution, and poor in its subsequent development.

That's basically what we've done at our table. Technomancers are "Type 2" (so to speak) magicians, and the Resonance Realms are explicitly metaplanes.

I'm fine with 'Technomancers are just magic' on every level except one. The Matrix is not a magical realm, and in point of fact is not one that should ever be able to be messed with by magic due to, again, the basic setting premise that magic is not compatible with technology. The whole existence of how Essence works, and why illusions -don't- work on cameras, you dig?

If we're tossing that out, then cool, because it gives Sams a lot more room to get really viciously nasty, but we need to be explicit in tossing it out when talking about how to rewrite this.

Of course I'm sure that PhysAds will still be better at it than Sams, given that opens up fun like weapon focus cyberarms.

Nonsense. What I am talking about is more like "we seem to have a memory leak, but I can't find where it is; I guess I'll make the garbage collector more aggressive and that should handle it before it impacts performance. Or, this creates a record in 9 out of 10 times, so I will create a job to make sure it is created." I would like to say that it is always possible to track down a flaw to the source and correct it, but due to a number of constraints, not the least of which is the business drive on time and value added. If an issue is causing a critical issue for someone now, you will be more likely to be forced to patch and move on. Hopefully, a root cause fix follows, but not always.

I don't care what they rebuilt, they reused code and in the virtual machine analogy I provided, the resource leak/loss is disconnected from the end user. Your processing concerns depend on processing power being expensive when that is not a given. We have gone from storage space is expensive to cheap (but not liimitless) today and to limitless in SR. There is no reason to believe that processing power is not at least cheap. The data center may indeed solve inefficiency by adding more servers.

Cloud computing today relies on virtual machines and they don't have issues with one virtual machine having magical full access to another. Your security concerns are not valid.

Multiple OS updates can cause your computer to become inefficient.
If I recall correctly, at one point, 75% to 90% of all Word macro viruses were legitimate macros that morphed over time into viruses because of the way Word resaved macros.
I am sure there are other instances of spontaneously created malware.

These are current and past, real world parallels to AIs spawning from legitimate applications. You should be aware of them before you start mocking biological comparisons.

In order to model AIs and technomancers not being able to teleport across the Matrix, the Virtual Machine pockets/fragments must emulate a core computer (a deck in the technomancer's case) from which the AI or technomancer runs their matrix persona and draws their enhanced abilities.

I'm making mocking biological comparisons because you clearly have no idea how computers work, on a fundamental level, which has led you to anthropomorphise the actions of programs.

OK Cabral, Binary, please step it down a notch. There is no need to insult one another.

I have worked in assembly as well as high level languages. I have argued repeatedly with business to get resources for root cause fixes instead of patches only. There have been cases where I knew the fix, but couldn't get approval for the QAT aspect. I have been overruled on the readiness of a release.

Your understanding of computers, fundamentally and in practice, and my grasp of computers are both overinflated.

Your lack of understanding of my proposed model has led you to inject anthropomorphization that was not present. If you need such a construct, I won't fault or mock you, but please don't then belittle biological sciences.

I started posting before this post, but I do not believe that I have insulted anyone. If I have, I apologize and would gladly reword. I know occasionally I can get a case of "there's someone wrong on the internet."

In any case, this is my model of what the matrix should be and I will only go so far to explain it. I have no intention of continuing discussions with Binary on this topic as we are not making any progress. However, if anyone, binary included, is interested in how I foresee this affecting the mechanical implementation, I would be happy to oblige.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Yes, for where we are in the setting's timeline, tech and magic do not mix, but the possibility for it to do so in the future is clearly implied.

To make my case, I'm going to throw it all the way back to the 1E/2E Grimoire where they talk about making virgin telesma (components) for use in foci. A virgin component is one you harvested yourself, and they're inherently more magical. Why? Because of the personal nature of the collection process. Consider Earthdawn where sentient races are called namegivers. This is because sentient races can believe. And with their belief, they can shape mana, create expectations, and give names and identities. The magical DNA of a particular thing is the way it is, at least partly, because that's what our communal belief says that thing should be.

According to the Grimoire, if you used C4 to blast the side of a mountain looking for magical crystals, the explosion would rip the magic right out of them. Why? Because the energy expended to blast them was impersonal. This is why a gun can barely scratch a spirit, but a bow or thrown knife can do much more damage. Because the willpower of the namegiver was present and directly transferred into physical force by throwing a knife. So too would your willpower be transferred to the crystal if you used a pickaxe to mine it.

The book goes on to explain that theoretically, one could create a virgin telesma and make a magic automobile, but the sheer scale of mining every mineral yourself and hand smelting it, harvesting plastics and refining them by hand, and so on is simply mind boggling.

Now, consider a cyberdeck. Perhaps the most complicated piece of equipment in existence with atom thin layer of circuitry upon atom thin layer. Machine labor that was entirely impersonal made it. No wonder it's distinctly non-magical. But, let's consider the possibility that even non-magical objects (say an old sword you want to enchant) can become magical with the right amount of effort put into them. You see where I'm going with this?

No, I don't think technomancers are good for players to play (there are always exceptions, however, for good writing), but I think the concept is one that has a lot of promise for the setting itself. Theoretically, there's nothing stopping technology from being magical. In the setting what we have a problem with is the execution and methods. As the opening story of the 2E handbook stated: There's billions of nuyen poured into R&D every year to make magical ICBMs. Just because there's been no practical resutls doesn't mean the theory isn't sound.

Consider what the Therans were capable of. Now add a population several orders of magnitude greater, the scientific method, and research labs on top of that. The future of technomagic is frightening.

My personal take is that perhaps an entirely new form of magic, one that is currently seemingly incompatible with current traditions, has formed around the idea of technomancy. The resonance realms are perhaps some new manifestation of a metaplane. Or perhaps they're simply the construct through which the technomancer channels his power. In my game, technomancers assense as mundane. Maybe it is currently impossible for a mage to cross from his metaplanes into the resonance realms because they're distinctly disconnected. But, maybe, with enough time and belief they could be joined. To borrow from DND, perhaps the metaplanes are one of the outer planes and the resonance realms are one of the inner planes. They're both planes, but you generally cannot go directly from one to the other given the vast gulf of distance (so to speak) between the two.

Magic and tech don't mix...for now. But isn't part of Shadowrun about always teasing players with sinister impossibilities leaking from black site R&D facilities?

@Xasten:

I've always thought the "be super-ultra-careful when harvesting magical components, or they become worthless" rule is completely nonsensical. If magic is *that* fragile, then it's basically worthless outside of ultra-sterile laboratory conditions. Enemy mage targeting you? No problem, just throw a bit of garbage or motor oil on him and that should shut him down completely. Or at least those would be the rules if they were being consistent about it. If magic completely falls apart if you even sneeze on it, then there's not a lot of reason to bother with it.

The rules themselves may be a overzealous, but I think the idea makes good sense.

It's not that getting rough with something breaks magic. It's that when you change the nature of an object, you change its magical identity. Let's use the C4 and magic crystal example. The crystal was a component of mother earth herself, and as such, is inherently magical. An explosion on the mountain side has broken the unified "thing" into component parts and each part now has a new identity.

It just so happens that the explosion was impersonal so no "new meaning" could be imparted to it by the direct willpower of a namegiver, so the only option left is that its new identity is a reduction of its former one. That's what they mean by the loss of magic. It's not that the crystal cannot then be used in a foci, its that its now no better than any other mundane rock. Whatever was special was stripped away.

Throwing motor oil on a mage doesn't change his identity, it mildly inconveniences him. Now, if you left him in a pool of highly toxic muck for a week or whatever, then, yeah, maybe he'd go toxic. The point is that the trauma has to be severe enough to change somethings identity. If it's an explosion, its a reduction of its former self. If it's an alchemist lovingly tending to some metal radicals then his attention is building them into something new.

Magic is about belief and and ideas. The idea of something is important to its magical DNA. The more belief / willpower / aspected mana / etc. is put into something the more it can be built into something greater. The more impersonal the process of changing something is, the lesser it becomes.

@Xasten:

Actually, the rule sections I've seen frame it more in the terms that magical components are very subject to contamination, which ruins them, regardless of how much you "believe" in that or not. And that's the part I find nonsensical. If magic's that easy to ruin, no one need be concerned about encountering it, and shouldn't rely on it for anything important. Just sneeze on it and it's history.

That's likely 4E & beyond, so I can't speak to that too well. I can easily concede that there's some...less than thought out ideas in a rulebook or two.

I have taken it as handcrafting imbues it with emotional energy that makes it easier. In the other direction, the complexity conflicts with the holistic nature. Alternatively, some forms of contamination could be considered as generating a minor background count....

Either way, any tiny deviation from being super-ultra-careful with magic ingredients and they're instantly ruined. My point is that magic can't be both ridiculously fragile and powerful at the same time. The canon rules on this are just not internally consistent.

Illusion used to work on camera (eg 3ed ed. Mental spell vs physical spell).

Actually, for me, the only real debate is : does magic mix with technology or not.

It wasn't the case early on; I guess that thing somehow disappeared. Cyberzombies, technomancers and so on.


If you ditch that part, then anything technomancer can do becomes somewhat legit. Their magic rapes basic computer stuff? Yes, like creating a fireball from nothing rapes the basics of physics.



That beeing said, I remain an old school purist and otakus>>technomancers who shouldn't have existed.

The fragility generally applies to telesma for enchanting.

Day to day magical objects, like foci and fetishes, are somewhere between sturdy and downright indestructible.

Many industrially-manufactured products are terribly volatile and/or fragile when in their precursor components.

That is still the behavior of illusions in 5e.

Looking at other magic, Analyze Device interacts with technology and you could make an argument for Fashion. There may be some better examples that I can't think of.

If you look at explicit exclusions, spirits and astral projecting mage cannot read displays, but it is because they see the emotional content of the object, not the physical appearance of the object (such as the screen contents).

Like I said in my earlier post, I think magic clearly does mix with tech, but it's a matter of undeveloped technique. It can in theory, but there are some significant R&D hurdles.

From a practical standpoint to the average runner, magic and tech do not mix, yes. But from a cutting edge theoretical view? There's absolutely no reason they can't. It's just a matter of figuring out the kinks, so to speak.

Actually I'd say that there's no question of whether or not but rather a series of "how?", "side effects?", "can they be controlled?" and finally "what level of insanity is required to do so?"



Depends on what you consider "early on": The very first novel of the Secrets of Power trilogy (the second book in the overall line) introduced a doppelganger creature that was a combination of genetic engineering and magic.



Or it wasn't quite as black and white from early on as one might think, because ...



... while it objectively took 6 years of SR production for Cyberzombies to formally appear that was still quite early in the overall process and along with the Universal Brotherhood storyline you already had seen simsense tech being used to determine good candidates for insect spirit mergers in the form of 2XS.

What certainly was lost was the initial notion that active use of magic was closely related to mental problems ... including outright insanity. I would certainly have preferred if that element had been kept more prevalent. That would have kept the mixture of cybertech - which was also associated with certain forms of mental problems - with magic a rather volatile thing that - while paying off in certain situations - always included the mixture of insanity with more insanity.



Otaku as a different expression of the cybertech based "insanity" certainly was more appealing to me as well when compared to technomancers being "magic that is no magic" in similar ways like "nega(tive) mages" supposedly weren't magic either. Instead of re-inventing the wheel with technomancers they should have gone with a solution that removed fading and over-turned some of the ramifications created by the whole mess of child aged tribes of autists with savant syndrome as part of the career criminal scene wherein shadowrunners exist.

Cyberzombies (and IIRC that doppleganger business) were as I recall specifically blood magic at the time, and blood magic broke a -lot- of the 'rules'.

Exactly my point. How exactly are you making sturdy tools out of components that are more fragile than glass figurines?

For the purest expression of this nonsense, see SR5 Street Grimoire, page 222, where hacking a bear to death with an axe is better at preserving its pelt than killing it with a single shot from a hunting rifle. I just don't know what drugs the writer was on.

But isn't this exactly the persistent (insoluble?) problem with SR rules of all stripes: they started out with a cool idea (in casu: handcrafted > mechanically developed materials for use in magic, because magic and tech don't mix, no Sir), and then dial it up to 11 in terms of adding complex mechanics for every foreseeable and unforeseeable situation WAY past the logical extreme, and far beyond what's playable or *gasp* fun (YMMV of course).

So in a sense the rather lengthy discussions above about the way imaginary computers work in an imaginary future, and how imaginary magic items are best crafted in the same imaginary future, illustrate the futility of that exercise, because as long as the aim is to cover all bases with game mechanics, there will always be someone, somewhere, who will be able to argue that [insert complex mechanic] is logically inconsistent and at odds with how things work in the real world.

So for my Nuyen, for SR6, I'd like to see a much simpler core mechanic that is aimed for playability and ambience (I'm looking at YOU Basicc D&D of 1981). If you want to have a section in the rules to explain how long a person can swim and the mechanics of drowning (with various tables for different modifiers, of course), more power to you. It doesn't, in my experience, make for an action-packed and gritty adventure through the underbelly of a dystopic ultra-capitalist society, though. And action is what the young people want - there's a reason BTL chips are wiz, you scan?

I'd say that the writer wasn't on drugs there. If anything he got the original idea for SR magic indeed absolutely correct and but depicted it in a way that didn't fully convey this particular idea (or its ramifications) for you: hacking the bear to death with an axe instead of outright shooting it is not about better preserving the physical pelt but rather about preserving its magical properties. That's the kind of insanity I was talking about. SR magic and its metaphysics have a lot to do with emotional and philosophical concepts rather than being a yet to be understood extension of known physics. And some of these concepts are "insane" and are further bent by the magic user's world view.

In this particular instance we (once again) learn that in order to (better) preserve the magic within the bear's pelt you have to work through an emotionally raw, brutal and physically dangerous ordeal rather than utilizing an ultimatley emotionally distanced, less brutal and less dangerous act. The logic behind that isn't flawed at all, it's just not a common line of thinking.

The author even formalized the involved insanity by stating that the nutjobs that work magic as talismongers explicitly turned that idea into a regulation of their United Talismongers Association

With the telesma it is basically using classic methods over industrialization.
Plant-Material:
Hand harvested, home grown, no fertilizers aside from maybe having something shit on it.

Same for metals. No blasting the stuff out of the ground with explosives and the such.
You go into a mine, you take your pickaxe, and you hack at it untill you have what you need.

Animal Parts is doing it the olden way as well. You have a bow and an Arrow.
You have an Axe and a Knife. You need something dangerous? Tough luck!
You need something not dangerous but tedious? Tough luck!
No remote killing, no big mclargehuge hunting traps and fishin nets.
You go and stand in that river and catch that rare fish by hand or with a throwing spear!

The cue is an investment of time and manual labor. No automatization. Nothing to make it easier.

Perfectly put.

I would argue that preserving the magical properties should require ritual sacrifice/killing and that killing, with rifle, axe, and bow without the ritual methodology should be considered equivalent.

An automated killing floor would be inferior.

You could argue that the brutality is part of the ritual or that it is transformative, but I don't think you could make the case that it is preservative. I would also argue that both properties could be applied to bow and rifle killings.

I still contend it's a crazy way to handle the "purity" concept for magical ingredients. A better solution would be to declare that it downgrades them (a little, not a lot). One of the bits of SR5 that I did like was the Reagent Quality table in SR5 Street Grimoire, p. 228. If your harvesting methods were less than traditional, kick it down a grade. Another possibility would be to offer alchemically enhanced versions of modern tools that don't impose such quality reductions. For instance, for the case of the magical bear getting getting hacked to death with an axe by an enraged troll (oh yeah, I'm sure the scraps of what was left of that pelt were in great shape after it was dead), offer the possibility of alchemical hunting rifle rounds that cost ten times normal, but don't "contaminate" any creatures shot with them. Pricey, but you can just shoot the thing instead of engaging in melee combat with it. The PC now has a choice - pay more money and get to use modern tools, or go the old school route but save money. I do agree that explosives are a bit much; if your harvesting method is "fishing with dynamite," then yeah, I'd rule anything gathered is near worthless.

This is better than all-or-nothing rules where the magical ingredients become irrevocably worthless if you so much as look at them wrong.

This is why I love SR metaphysics. We're able to have a debate over whether killing by hand "preserves" or "enhances" the magical potency of a dead bear and to what extent hand to hand, versus will-powered projectiles, versus chemical non-willpowered killing is effective. The debate is simultaneously important distinctions between the two and pure semantics.

This sounds like a mage versus shaman shadowtalk that belongs in Awakenings.

LOL. Can you guess that I always play Hermetic (of some flavor) magicians?

Damn hippie shamans always going on about their "spiritual purity" nonsense.

And why exactly would you argue that? I see nothing in the SR metaphysics for magic that would establish such a "demand" and since this thread is also about what "I" think that a new edition "should" bring along I'm most definitely against what you're saying there.



An automated killing floor should actually just be "more inferior" up to the point of making stuff completely useless in terms of what SR magic has been about since day one.



I certainly can argue that ... I actually already did exactly that: I'm saying that elements like brutality, emotional involvement and danger for the person trying to "harvest" something in order to retain its magical properties could be viewed as "preservative" when compared to an act that is less brutal, takes less emotional involvment and certainly removes larger portions of the dangers. As I tried to point out: It's all about philosophical and emotional concepts not about logic or actual physics.



And I'd say you're trying to apply a sense of physics based logic.

"Crazy" as in "insane"?



That's a matter of granularity within the rules. Primarily speaking with SR3 in mind: Such an idea already existed within the rules ... but that doesn't preclude the "fluff" part - like the intro in SR5's Grimoire you referenced - from presenting an in fiction perspective that is more extreme. And that's the part where I'd want a new edition to properly inform (and regularly remind) the reader / player that in fiction depictions might me (over-) simplifications, biased expressions of world views, etc. It's fluff vs. crunch for a reason.



Again more of problem with granilarity of the rules than anything else. And yes, I certainly would prefer a new edition to have granularity that is supported by both fluff and crunch and not just binary mechanisms.
Heck, I'm one of the people that hates the universal magic theory and would revert the removal of mechanical distinction between different magic traditions in the blink of an eye if I were in charge.




Here's the fun part: All my magically active characters were hermetics or similarly "logically" inclined magic users as well. "Shamans" were only created as NPCs.

Am I looking into a mirror?